When it comes to overseas voters, the Trump campaign can’t quite decide what to do. On one hand, Donald Trump wants their votes. On the other, he thinks they are traitorous scumbags who are part of a vast voter-fraud scheme. So, while he is wooing overseas voters with tax-break promises, Republicans are filing a flurry of lawsuits explicitly targeting overseas voting. No one will be surprised to learn that Republicans are only worried about overseas votes in the swing states.
Last week, Trump released a video pledging to end what he calls “double taxation” on Americans who live overseas. Currently, Americans abroad are required to pay income taxes in their country of residence and here. It’s easy to get whipped into a frenzy about this until you learn that the tax exemption for overseas taxpayers is $126,500, and they can also reduce their tax bill with foreign tax credits. Because of that, roughly 82% don’t pay any taxes here. So, any giveaway to overseas voters is really a gift limited to the rich.
Trump’s pitch didn’t arise organically. In fact, it looks a lot like he made up this whole plank of his tax policy platform because basically one random Republican dude asked him to. Solomon Yue, who heads the advocacy group Republicans Overseas, bragged to the Wall Street Journal that he decided to approach Trump after seeing how willing Trump was to promise tax giveaways to everyone else.
Before the Trump years, this sort of thing might not have been a major scandal, but people at least might have refrained from telling a major publication how this repugnant sausage is made. However, prior to Trump, this likely wouldn’t have happened at all. The cult-like adoration of Trump’s MAGA base, combined with his willingness to hollow out the party’s finances and force out anyone who disagrees with him, means that the usual framework of needing to sell an idea to Republicans as a whole has collapsed. Now someone can approach Trump directly and dangle the shiny promise of votes in front of his face, and Trump will react like a toddler and greedily reach for it with both hands.
Hilariously, it’s not even clear that Yue represents a large contingency of voters. The website for his group, Republicans Overseas, has such a low-rent vibe that one of the handful of pictures is sideways. The New Republic found that neither Yue nor his group appears to have given at all this election cycle.
In the video, Trump also did his weird, overdramatic thing where he promises to be a strong protector, telling overseas voters, “You’ve been wanting this for years, and nobody has listened to you. And you deserve it. And I’m going to do it.”
Echoing his creepy promise to women that he would be their “protector,” Trump also urged overseas citizens to vote because if they do, only Trump will shield them.
“You have to make sure that you are registered and you are going to vote because I’m going to take very good care of you.”
But while Trump is begging Americans overseas to vote and wooing them with tax cuts, he’s also working to make it harder for them to vote.
Last month, Trump coughed up a new voter-fraud fixation: that anyone living overseas can get a ballot even if they aren’t registered to vote, which somehow is also election meddling. He said that Democrats will use UOCAVA, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, to email ballots to people “without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever.” Then he mused that this might show foreign interference with elections. He also took to Truth Social to complain that Democrats “want to dilute the TRUE vote of our beautiful military and their families.”
Falling right in line, the GOP has sued multiple swing states, bringing lawsuits about overseas voters. The lawsuit against Michigan is over “never resided” voters—people who have never lived in America but whose parents previously lived in Michigan. The state has said this is a vanishingly small amount, but Republicans are concerned that they lean “overwhelmingly” Democratic.
The Michigan suit asserts this violates the residency requirements of the state constitution and asks that the state reject all votes from never resided voters or to “segregate” them until they can determine if it affects the outcome. The lawsuit against North Carolina is basically the same—demanding the state reject all votes from never resided voters. Thirty-eight states and Washington, D.C., have similar laws, but somehow, Republicans find fault only when it’s a swing state.
In Pennsylvania, the allegation is that because overseas voters don’t have the same ID requirements as absentee voters who live in the state, it is supposedly a vehicle for voter fraud. Notably, six members of Pennsylvania’s eight-Republican House delegation signed on to the lawsuit—and on Jan. 6, 2021, every last one of those six voted against certifying the commonwealth’s 2020 electoral votes.
Most overseas voters still have to undergo various confirmations of their identity and ballots are sent only to people whose registrations have been verified by their state.
As The Washington Post reported Monday, the Republican lawsuits are sparking fear in members of the military—both active-duty and veterans—that their votes won’t be counted. In Nevada, the backlash apparently led to three lawsuits challenging voter registration—including a bunch of military voters—had been dismissed by the plaintiff.
Here’s the real issue. Until 2016, overseas voters were largely military, but in that election cycle and in 2020, civilians cast the vast majority of ballots. Voters who are veterans overwhelmingly back Trump, so to him, their votes are great—but votes from other Americans abroad, not so much. The allegations of overseas fraud are also likely flying fast and furious because Democrats are actively making a play for overseas voters, spending $300,000 on voter outreach for the first time.
This puts the GOP in roughly the same spot they were in the 2021 Georgia runoff elections. Trump, having lost the state in 2020, was running around saying that the state’s elections were rigged. At the same time, the GOP was trying to turn out voters for the Senate runoff contests. That didn’t turn out so well for them. Democrats won both seats.
In the end, the GOP and Trump just can’t stop themselves. They’re now so wedded to the Big Lie that they will shoot themselves in the foot and depress turnout from their own base. It’s such a sharp contrast to the Democratic message of outreach and encouragement, a message that voting matters and voting works. All Trump offers is the bleak vision that everything is rigged.
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